Run multiple WU clients - No Sandboxie or VM required

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So I find it interesting no one else has bothered posting this. Not sure if they were just reluctant to share the information or what. It doesn't seem like anything that requires a great deal of technical knowledge to do, but I've seen nothing about it posted so far. So I figured I'd shed some light on it and enlighten those of you who don't already know how to do this.

There are some caveats to this of course, the main being that if you're going to run multiple clients to connect to different servers and you want your friends to join your game, it's only going to try and connect them to the last one that you've connected to.

This guide will demonstrate how to run multiple instances of the same Wurm Unlimited copy with just using one steam account, no VM or other 3rd party software required. So without further ado here is the guide:

So with an instance of Wurm Unlimited already running do the following steps:

Open task manager (ctrl+shift+esc will you get you there the quickest)

Go to the 'Details' tab from within task manager.

Find the 'SteamService.exe' click on it once and hit the 'End task' button located on the bottom right hand corner of task manager.

Find the 'Steam.exe' process and once again click it and 'End task'

Check to see if GameOverlayUI.exe is running, if so end task on that process as well.

Now just relaunch Steam and login as usual and launch Wurm Unlimited (Steam doesn't know about the previous instance running anymore )

Repeat these task for however many clients you would like to run.

Notes:

Always make sure to close SteamService.exe first, if you close Steam.exe first it will automatically close your game with it!

You'll need to have administrative privileges on the Windows account you're running on. (By default on a standard Windows install the first user created will by default have admin privileges)

Here is a quick batch file I threw together in order to automate the process of having to close steam and relaunch it. This batch file will atuomatically close all steam processes running and then relaunch steam, login (if you set the credentials), then automatically launch Wurm Unlimited for you.

Copy the code above into a text editor (Notepad, Notepad++ or the like), then save the file as WurmUnlimited.bat to a place of your choosing. You can rename it from WurmUnlimited to whatever you like, just note the .bat you'll need to make sure you change the file type under save as to *.* . Once saved right click and run as administrator.

Notes:

This batch file requires that you use the 'Remember my password' check box on steam at least once prior to using this batch.

This batch assumes that you install Steam to the default location (Program Files (x86)\Steam\). If you've changed this, then you'll need to change the variable Steam to reflect the correct path.

Let me know if you all have any questions or suggestions, or if you found this useful :-)

Edit: Additional info added.

Edit: 10-28-2015 - Updated the batch file, thanks to Steam user Fattox on the Steam forums for improving it to use the cached saved credentials that Steam stores,now uses a more secure way to handle saved credentials! Updated with a few additional notes.

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So I find it interesting no one else has bothered posting this. Not sure if they were just reluctant to share the information or what. It doesn't seem like anything that requires a great deal of technical knowledge to do, but I've seen nothing about it posted so far. So I figured I'd shed some light on it and enlighten those of you who don't already know how to do this.

There are some caveats to this of course, the main being that if you're going to run multiple clients to connect to different servers and you want your friends to join your game, it's only going to try and connect them to the last one that you've connected to.

This guide will demonstrate how to run multiple instances of the same Wurm Unlimited copy with just using one steam account, no VM or other 3rd party software required. So without further ado here is the guide:

So with an instance of Wurm Unlimited already running do the following steps:

Open task manager (ctrl+shift+esc will you get you there the quickest)

Go to the 'Details' tab from within task manager.

Find the 'SteamService.exe' click on it once and hit the 'End task' button located on the bottom right hand corner of task manager.

Find the 'Steam.exe' process and once again click it and 'End task'

Check to see if GameOverlayUI.exe is running, if so end task on that process as well.

Now just relaunch Steam and login as usual and launch Wurm Unlimited (Steam doesn't know about the previous instance running anymore )

Repeat these task for however many clients you would like to run.

Notes:

Always make sure to close SteamService.exe first, if you close Steam.exe first it will automatically close your game with it!

You'll need to have administrative privileges on the Windows account you're running on. (By default on a standard Windows install the first user created will by default have admin privileges)

Here is a quick batch file I threw together in order to automate the process of having to close steam and relaunch it. This batch file will atuomatically close all steam processes running and then relaunch steam, login (if you set the credentials), then automatically launch Wurm Unlimited for you.

Copy the code above into a text editor (Notepad, Notepad++ or the like), change USERNAME and PASSWORD to those of your own, then save the file as WurmUnlimited.bat to a place of your choosing. You can rename it from WurmUnlimited to whatever you like, just note the .bat you'll need to make sure you change the file type under save as to *.* . Once saved right click and run as administrator.

Also, this is saving your steam account password in plain text on your computer, so if you share you're computer this is not advised, unless you're comfortable with those people potentially knowing your steam password. If you don't want to store your steam password on your computer then just remove %SteamPassword% from the batch file. Steam will just prompt you for it once it launches.

Let me know if you all have any questions or suggestions, or if you found this useful :-)

Edit: Additional info added.

just so it doesnt go anywhere.

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So lets get this straight you are using this to allow friends to play with you?

I'm using this because on Wurm Online I played with a few different priest characters at once. I wanted to bring that same ability and experience over to my own Wurm Unlimited server. I don't see why it wouldn't be right when I'm able to do the same thing on Wurm Online. My feelings are the devs, given the ability to (since steam is what limits this), would offer a solution to run multiple clients. Since it can't be done due to limitations of Steam, I work around Steam altogether.

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Hmm...no such processes running on any of my machines. Just steam.exe and steamwebhelper.exe, but all 3 of my machines have recent steam installs. Looks like those processes have been replaced by steamwebhelper.exe.

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The dedicated server can operate entirely independent from the Steam application on your computer. Or, in other words, you don't even need steam anymore, after you've installed Wurm Unlimited dedicated server, to launch and run the server.

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Hmm...no such processes running on any of my machines. Just steam.exe and steamwebhelper.exe, but all 3 of my machines have recent steam installs. Looks like those processes have been replaced by steamwebhelper.exe.

Check that the path variable in the batch file matches the actual path on your hard drive. I had same problem until I played with this.

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Hmm...no such processes running on any of my machines. Just steam.exe and steamwebhelper.exe, but all 3 of my machines have recent steam installs. Looks like those processes have been replaced by steamwebhelper.exe.

Steam.exe is the one you'll want to close then, if it's not already running the SteamService.exe

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An interesting effect with any of our methods is, that the WU server will stop listing you as an online player once you kill or disconnect the associated Steam process from your client. So even though you're online on your server, it'll say 0 out of N players online. Not sure what that really is about, but it's not causing problems as of now.

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That's because those numbers that show up in the server listing are being handled by steam, not from Wurm Unlimited server itself. The Wurm Unlimited Server will still report the correct numbers if you open the stats.xml file in your Wurm Unlimited Server directory look for 'players="#"'.